[tflabo]

My first PC was a Tandy 286 with a 40MB HD.

[Myrddin]

My first was a Heath H-8. Ran HDOS and CP/M. Upgraded from a 2 MHz 8080 to a 4 MHz Z80. Bumped memory from 4k static RAM to 64k dynamic ram (4 rows of 16k)...Trionyx 3rd party memory and CPU as well as their 3 layer mother board. It had a 6 port serial board and interfaces for floppy and intelligent 8" DSDD drives. It was a 1980 vintage machine built board by board by yours truly. I hand-wired a graphics chips and sound chip and wrote all the interface software for them. The 3-D wire frame drawings were a novelty in 1981. Kudos to Foley and van Dam for the graphics algorithms.

I didn't have much money to spend on hardware in the early 80's. My first terminal was the H-9. It was 12 lines of 40 characters with uppercase only. I wire-wrapped additional video memory, fixed the clocks and added a character generator ROM with lowercase. For about $20 and 3 hours of labor, it was upgraded to 24 lines x 80 chars. Not much different than what I use daily to write software.

The Software Toolworks C compiler worked pretty well in CP/M. It took 20 minutes to compile the word count code from UNIX (wc.c). After about 3 weeks of serious code development in C, the 8" drive head banged off of the support arm. It was time to move on to hard disk to stay in the game.

[TXnMA]

"My first PC was a Tandy 286 with a 40MB HD."

Noob. '-) My first computer was an Apple][+ with 16 K of RAM (I upgraded it to 64K) -- and a Radio Shack cassette tape player as my "hard drive"...

[Monitor]

My first PC was a Tandy 286 with a 40MB HD.

Ha! My first PC was a Morrow Designs Z80 with 64K of RAM, dual 360K floppies, and ran CP/M patched with ZCPR3.3. I could have gotten a 10MB HD for an extra $300, but I couldn't afford it.